Hello Puppets: Midnight Show Demo Preview

Hello Puppets: Midnight Show is the prequel to the VR title Hello Puppets. Midnight Show doesn’t require VR so anyone can play it.

Midnight Show takes place before the happenings of the first game. You take control of Owen Gubberson, the creator of Mortimer’s Handeemen. You brought your puppets to life in a last ditch effort to save the show and as per usual they turned into psychopathic killers right away. When will people learn that messing with forbidden magic always has consequences?

Your goal is to escape the sound stage alive. The puppet Knack is putting on a show and wants audience members to attend. You have to sneak around the level and find the paper cut outs to stand in as audience members before Knack finds you and ends your life. This does seem counter productive for the puppet as killing the one person helping you achieve your goal doesn’t seem logical.

The game plays like a stealth puzzle game. You sneak around the level while avoiding the puppet. If it spots you, you can run into a closet and play a minigame to prevent them from opening it. The minigame is fairly easy so the game does give you some leeway in surviving. Sometimes the puppet will hide in posters and if you walk past them, it will grab you and immediately end the game. The posters have little eye cutouts so you can tell at a glance whether nor not the puppet is there. I am quite bad at paying attention so I died pretty frequently to the posters.

Almost every object you interact with in the level requires batteries of some sort. You can find batteries lying around in random places or take them out of objects. Once you power up the device, you can interact with them to unlock a paper cut out. There are also clues to larger puzzles spread across the level for you to collect and decipher. You have to sneak around and do all of this while avoiding the puppet.

Overall, Hello Puppets: Midnight Show turned out to be an enjoyable demo for me. It was surprisingly difficult and I still haven’t managed to beat it quite yet. The mechanics are pretty simple but some of the puzzle elements are more difficult to solve and I always ended up slipping up and getting caught by the puppet before I could finish the level.